LFF Dispatch #5: It Takes a Village in Fernando Eimbcke's Social Realist Charmer Moscas

FLIES / Moscas 

(Fernando Eimbcke, 2026, Mexico, 101 minutes) 

"For a child, playing is a deeply serious matter. Children don’t need poetic dialogue or images; they are poetic in their very existence."--Fernando Eimbcke

Fernando Eimbcke certainly took his time following up Duck Season. His debut arrived in 2004, and here he is with the spiritual sequel 22 years later. Then again, he wrote the first draft of the screenplay 25 years ago. Not until he joined forces with novelist Vanesa Garnica was he able to get it right.

To prepare, I set out to rewatch his first film, also in black and white, but it isn't available to stream with English subtitles, and my Spanish comprehension isn't all it could be. I checked every possible streaming site, including foreign ones, and settled on Russia's Ok.ru, which offers an unsubtitled version (I later found another unsubtitled one on YouTube). 

Fortunately, it isn't necessary to watch the earlier film to appreciate the latest, since they have little in common other than the setting and the black and white. Since Mubi picked up Flies after its Berlin Film Festival premiere, where it won the Ecumenical award, I hope they'll also pick up his debut. 

Right: Duck Season, aka Temporada de Patos

Set in and around a brutalist Mexico City apartment complex located next to a hospital, his playful, visually inventive take on social realism begins with a buzzing fly waking up Olga (The Chambermaid's invaluable Teresita Sánchez). She does everything she can to shoo it toward an open window, but it just won't go. 

Taciturn and slow-moving, Olga is a curmudgeon, but like most Eimbcke characters, she contains multitudes. When a couple in the unit above indulges in noisy sex while she's watching TV, she doesn't pound on the ceiling with a broomstick, but stops to listen before turning up the volume.

When she interacts with the world outside, however, she always has some kind of complaint. It doesn't help that she's been feeling poorly, so she visits a podiatrist about her foot pain, hoping for a quick fix, but the doctor tells Olga she needs nail surgery. Unfortunately, it costs 3,000 pesos she doesn't have, so she tacks up signs around the complex advertising a room for rent for family members of patients. The larger the party, the higher the charge. 

A day laborer with a wife in the cancer ward spots one of Olga's signs and makes arrangements to rent the room. He has a few pesos to his name, but not a lot. Eimbcke and Garnica, who prioritize the present, provide no details about his background, other than to suggest that he's from a smaller town. 

Tulio (sympathetic newcomer Hugo Ramírez) is polite and respectful, seemingly the perfect guest, while Olga is anything but the perfect host, sniffing, "I don't want to hear anything about your sick relative." There's another problem: Tulio has a nine-year-old son, Cristian (fellow newcomer Bastián Escobar, a wily, spirited presence who never seems to be acting), and he can't afford the landlady's rate for two guests, so he sneaks Cristian in to the duplex late at night and sneaks him out early in the morning. 

Estela's health is so precarious that she can't have visitors, and children aren't allowed at all. At night, father and son gaze longingly at what they believe to be her hospital room window, waiting for her fortunes to improve. 

Cristian is, for the most part, a happy-go-lucky kid, but he misses his mom just as much as his dad, and tries to communicate with her using the flashlight she gave him. He also writes "mommy" in the grime on the guest room window, something Olga notices when she starts to suspect that Tulio is hiding something.

Left to his own devices while his dad takes care of business, Cristian explores the neighborhood. A cop catches him peeing behind a tree, but the kid does a runner. He'll spend the rest of the film trying to evade an authority figure Eimbcke depicts from Cristian's low-to-the-ground child's-eye view, suggesting that the cop is some hulking, lumbering monster. 

One of the defining features of Eimbcke's work is the way characters look through or are reflected in shiny surfaces. It isn't the same as breaking the fourth wall, since they're looking at something other than the camera in the context of the narrative. In Duck Season, they gaze into an oven and at a TV screen; in Flies, it's an arcade game screen and convenience store mirror. 

Just as the teens in Duck Season play a football video game with great enthusiasm, Cristian is obsessed with the Space Invaders-like arcade game Cosmic Defenders. When it comes to his mom, he puts his faith in his dad, who pays her bills as best he can, and the medical team trying to help her get better. 

He's just a kid, and there's nothing he can do, but when he plays the game, he's in control. As he vaporizes aliens, it's as if he were vaporizing the cancer cells invading Estela's body. The 2-bit game with its high-energy synth soundtrack serves as a sort of score, lending the film a 1980s feel, though Flies is set in the today of personal computers and cellphones.

With money running low, Tulio looks for work that will extend their time in the city, but when Olga spots the two eating lunch at a diner, she searches his suitcase and finds children's clothes, confirming her suspicion that Tulio has been hiding the kid from her. The next time they meet, she confronts him. "I let you into my home and this is how you repay me," she barks before demanding more money and ordering them to leave in two days. If they don't, she threatens to call the police. Tulio agrees to her terms before taking a temporary job that will leave Cristian alone with the curmudgeon. 

Before he leaves, Tulio sets Cristian up with a cellphone. The boy does his best to avoid Olga by befriending vendors and shop keepers with whom he makes trades, and all of whom treat him with kindness, even if he tries their patience with his rambunctiousness. When he finds five pesos on the ground, he goes to town on Cosmic Defenders, racking up a high score, and when he finds that he can play the game on his phone, he struggles to tear himself from it.

When he isn't playing the game, he tries to figure out how to sneak a pair of slippers, which he pronounces "sleepers," to his mom (the Spanish word is zapatilla or pantufla). He can't do it on his own, especially with that annoying cop buzzing around, so he devises a plan that leads him to Isaac (Duck Season's pizza delivery man Enrique Arreola), a kindly laundry worker with whom he also plays Cosmic Defenders. More importantly, Isaac offers to bring the slippers to Estela, while cautioning that it could get him fired. 

Cristian next goes to work on the female security workers who decide which visitors can and cannot enter the hospital. Despite his formidable charm offensive, they refuse to let him in, since they could get fired, too, but they offer to find his mom, so he'll know exactly which room she's staying in. 

Without saying a word, Olga watches the boy come and go, feining disinterest as she plays online Sudoku, but he crosses a line when he makes a mess in the bedroom. She demands he clean it up, which is fair, but it doesn't scare him away. Though she insists he stay in the room when in her home, he sneaks out to watch TV after she falls asleep. She catches him in the act, and shoos him away, but not before he swipes a few pesos to play Cosmic Defenders. 

Slowly, but surely, Olga starts to warm up to the kid. I saw it coming from a mile away, but that doesn't make the wearing down of her resistance any less satisfying as she starts to see the situation more clearly: Cristian needs help, and she has the means to provide it. She's also lonely as hell. 

Soon, she's treating him to lunch and plotting how to get the slippers to his mom. They also find they have a few things in common, but I won't spoil the rather amusing surprise. All the while, Eimbcke also avoids specific details about her background, other than to suggest she might have had a son once, which helps to explain her resistance to such a likeable young man. 

It isn’t until late in the proceedings that Olga finally cracks a smile. As an actress, Sánchez can look exceptionally dowdy and downcast, but she has the kind of smile that makes her entire countenance appear beatific. Olga even shares with Cristian her love of cha-cha-chá music, revealing the kind of person she might have been once before disappointment and delusionment took over. 

Mostly, she does what she can to connect Cristian with his mom. As he faces the fact that she might not get better, Eimbcke turns to magical realism in a way that echoes Poltergeist and Videodrome, but in a much more dreamy, benevolent way. Suffice to say: Cosmic Defenders is involved. What might be just another arcade game in another film plays a thematic role here. 

The indomitable fly returns at the end, and this time, Olga leaves it alone.

Of the films I saw at this year's London Film Festival, including two gala premieres, Flies was the most low-key. There was no hype, no lines filled with punters clamoring to get in, and no red carpets at Royal Festival Hall. It was also the funniest, most touching, and least ponderous. Granted, I was thrilled to see that Eimbcke had followed up Duck Season after all these years, even if the characters are different, but there were probably plenty of festivalgoers unfamiliar with it, not least since it's become so difficult to see in English. 

A delight from start to finish, Flies ranks among my favorite Mexican films of the 21st-century–all set in a Mexico City that proves alternately foreboding and welcoming–along with Alejandro Gerber Bicecci's Dead Man's Switch and Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, both also shot in luminous black and white. In all three beautifully-acted features, working class people take center stage. If they don't necessarily triumph at the end, they’re neither broken nor bowed as their directors imbue them with the dignity and complexity they deserve.

And in Bastián Escobar’s Cristian, Eimbcke introduces a lovable scamp for the ages, just as Teresita Sánchez proves why she's one of Mexico's finest and most nimble performers. It's a worthy social realist successor to David Fortune's Color Book and even Vittorio De Sica's immortal Bicycle Thieves.

There are no more screenings of Flies at LFF, which ends tonight, and nor are any Seattle screenings scheduled, but it plays Portland's Latin American Film Festival, which begins today, on Nov 18. Considering that Fernando Eimbcke's fourth feature, Olmo (also cowritten with Vanesa Garnica), was released in the US in August, Flies probably won't see release until 2027. One way or the other, I'll update this post when I have more information. 

Images from Variety (Hugo Ramirez and Bastián Escobar), IMDb (Daniel Miranda, Diego Cataño, Danny Perea, and Enrique Arreola), Moviepilot (Ramirez and Escobar), and IONCINEMA (Escobar and Teresita Sánchez).

LFF Dispatch #4: Land of Hope and Gory - Horror Shorts from the UK, France, and Canada

I didn't arrive in London in time to cover the first screening of this horror-themed program--or programme, which looks classier--but it plays again on Oct 18, the last day of the festival. Lucy Luscombe's Meatmylk is the only film the LFF didn't include in their digital library, but I wrote about all others. Of the six films, the LFF has offered a content advisory for four regarding scenes of graphic violence or injury, nudity, and sex. Most horror fans wouldn't find any of these films too hard to handle, but the squeamish may want to take note. In alphabetical order.

ALL YOURS
(Sophia Di Martino, UK, 2025, 8 mins)

All Yours begins with a bit of foreshadowing as the lovely Audrey (Loki's Sophia Di Martino), a lonely homemaker, peels and eats a hard-boiled egg. That night, she finds herself scratching at her neck. The next morning, the scratching continues until she pulls a thin layer of skin off her entire body. 

It's nothing like the self-mutilation of Marina de Van's unsettling In My Skin; it’s more like a snake doing what snakes do. Audrey looks the same afterward, but now a disgusting pile of skin covers her bathroom floor. She tries to tell her best friend, except Mora (Lady's Sian Clifford) only wants to talk about herself, so Audrey heads to the kitchen and gets to work. 

What starts out as a disturbing development culminates in a metaphor for liberation, enhanced by filmmaker Di Martino's charming performance.

FISHBRAIN
(Max Vanderspuy, UK
2026, 22 mins)

Creature feature meets folk horror in Max Vanderspuy's Fishbrain. 

Ori (Dune: Prophecy's Chloe Lea), a young woman in a fishing village, dropped out of school to look after her surly grandfather, Jeb (Red Riding's John Henshaw), after her grandmother died. 

Something has been ailing the local fish population, but she swears she's serving him the good stuff. Once she's had enough of his shit, though, she turns to the bad stuff, but it has no effect on the old bastard. As their relationship continues to devolve, the toxic fish exert a more profound effect on her. 

Vanderspuy shot the film in low light with frequent cutaways to slimy fish with squishy guts. After Tony, the seafood-centric film about Anthony Bourdain, I found myself craving fish and chips. After Fishbrain, I'd rather not look at a fish ever again, so I can't say it didn't make an impression.

THE LAST SNOW / La Dernière Neige
(Rodolphe Bouquet-Populus, France, 2025, 19 mins)  

A night-skiing enthusiast gets separated from his companions in writer/director Rodolphe Bouquet-Populus's survivalist thriller The Last Snow. 

With extra time on his hands, Guillaume (Guillaume Pottier) decides to take a chair lift up the mountain to watch a ski ceremony. He rides with Isabelle (Compartment No. Six's Dinara Drukarova), a mysterious Russian woman who tells him about a deadly bear attack and explains how the resort handles times of light snow. She also expresses an intense fear of heights, so I'm not exactly sure what she's doing on a chairlift in the first place. 

Then they catch glimpses of alarming sights and sounds below them suggesting that an unhinged creature is on the loose, so Guillaume does all he can to persuade Isabelle to jump off the chair to run away, but she's as stubborn as hell, and things don't end especially well. 

The actors are convincingly scared shitless and Bouquet-Populus builds tension effectively, but The Last Snow doesn't really go anywhere, other than to confirm that the tallest of tall tales can turn out to be true. And that night skiing probably isn't the best idea.   

MAN EATING PUSSY 
(Lee Lawson, Canada, 2026, 12 minutes)

Oh, those frisky Canadians! 

When I received an email, shortly before the festival, about a film called "Man Eating Pussy," I thought there must have been a mistake. Was it spam? Was it pornography? No and no, as it turns out. 

Actor and director Grace Glowicki, who first came to my attention in Booger and last graced Seattle cinemas with Dead Lover, plays a sex worker with a vagina for a face. In real life, even women would probably find that pretty horrible, but the terminally ill man who meets with her for a date seems more surprised than horrified, and the makeup effects are truly impressive. 

I won't say more, other than that Glowicki and Julian Richings are pretty great and that the title has a different meaning than you might expect. This short would make for a particularly provocative pairing with Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth, a black comedy about a young woman (Jess Weixler) with teeth where one would not normally expect--or want--to find them. 

THE SORROWS OF YOUNG CHARLOTTE
(Shir Ariya, UK, 2026, 13 mins) 

Charlotte (Liv Jekyll) and Werther (Fabian Bevan) are longtime friends. Until recently, she was in a relationship and he was single, but after four years, her boyfriend dumps her, and she's devastated. Werther steps in to offer support, but he's really hoping to consummate a longtime crush. 

Charlie is lonely and vulnerable enough to give in, but when he tries to perform, he can't. Then, he spots some potency pills in her medicine cabinet, and they're able to finish what they started. Afterward she makes it clear that this was a one-off, but it's too late: he's confessed his feelings, and the pills worked too well, leading to a darkly comic conclusion. 

Although a man could have made this film, I knew a woman did, because Werther believes that Charlie's boyfriend is the only thing standing in his way--rather than that she's just not into him (though she could have let him down a little easier). Werther isn't necessarily a bad guy, but he's dangerously naïve, except instead of turning the object of affection into a victim, like in Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End or Curry Barker's Obsession, Shir Ariya, a Thai filmmaker based in the UK, ensures that the man gets his comeuppance. Though the makeup effects could have been more effective, The Sorrows of Young Charlotte offers a welcome corrective to the films in which a woman must pay for failing to live up to a man's expectations. 

Above: a 52-second glimpse into Man Eating Pussy.

Land of Hope and Gory, an 89-min program, screens at LFF on Sun, Oct 18, 8pm at BFI Southbank, Screen NFT2. The screening is sold out, but tickets may be available at the door. Images from Film Affinity (All Yours poster), the IMDb (Fishbrain poster), the BIFFF (The Last Snow poster), and British Council UK Films Database (Liv Jekyll in The Sorrows of Young Charlotte).  

LFF Dispatch #3: The Mother-Child Bond Proves Frightful in Finnish Horror Nightborn

NIGHTBORN / Yön Lapsi 

(Hanna Bergholm, Finland/Lithuania/France/UK, 2026, 92 mins)

"Fuck London."--a sentiment a father will come to regret 

A baby is bound to be challenging for any new parents, except the little fellow in Hannah Bergholm's Nightborn, winner of the Cheval Noir--the top prize--at this year's Fantasia International Film Festival, isn't just different, but mysterious and inexplicable, almost like a creature from another planet.

In Bergholm's first feature, Hatching, a preteen gymnast with a tightly-wound mother cares for an egg that hatches into a strange and terrifying creature. She leaned on practical effects, like puppetry and animatronics, for her tactile take on suburban conformity and toxic parenting.

Right: Just a girl and her egg in 2022's Hatching

For her followup, again cowritten with Ilja Rautsi, she switches to English, for the most part, while exploring the mother-child bond from an entirely different angle. She also shifts from the suburbs to the Finnish countryside where newlyweds Jon (Harry Potter's Rupert Grint), a Brit, and Saga (Seidi Haarla) have arrived to start a family in her ancestral home. 

The cottage may have been beautiful and sturdy in her late grandmother's day, but her mother (Pirkko Saisio), an academic, had no interest in it, and now the floorboards are literally rotting. She and Jon aren't discouraged, though. They'll fix it up and raise three kids, exactly as they had planned. 

After exploring the house, they venture into the woods, where Jon notices that some of the trees have troll-like characteristics and seem to want to trip him up. He's a bit creeped out, but Saga finds it all very literally stimulating, and the next time Bergholm catches up with them, she's in labor. 

Saga gives birth in a bloody spurt, after which the nurses spirit the baby away, and she doesn't understand why. Once she's had her rest, she meets the hairy, cranky, but otherwise healthy child. Bergholm doesn't show its face, so we have to take it on faith that it isn't monstrous. She and Jon proceed to name the little tyke Christian, which seems ironic, but Jon is a vicar's son.  

After the birth, Saga's body starts to change in subtle and disturbing ways, and no matter what she does, Christian responds more positively to Jon. The same is true of her mother, sister, and in-laws, too, though not by much. 

After several painful biting encounters while nursing, Saga comes to find that her offspring prefers blood to milk, but no one believes her. In fact, her nearest and dearest believe that she's the problem, especially her non-nurturing mother and resentful sister (Pamela Tola). Others find the aggressive fellow altogether off-putting, suggesting that this isn't a textbook case of post-partum depression or even psychosis, but whenever Saga tries to do non-mommy things, it cries out for her. (She thinks of Christian as more of an "it" than a "he.) She feels like she can't win, because she can't. 

It's only when Saga gives the kid what he wants, that things change. It's just that Christian, whose name she spontaneously changes to Kuura (Finnish for "Frost") without consulting Jon, doesn't want normal things, driving a wedge between her and her normie husband as she finally bonds with the weird little being. Her mother and sister claim that she was once a weird little being, too, something Bergholm never explains, other than to suggest that Saga more closely resembles her grandmother.

Suffice to say, Saga's sister was the easy one, whereas Saga was also a difficult child. There are elements of Rosemary's Baby to the scenario, not least when Jon segues from supportive to judgmental, but the baby is neither demonic nor vampiric. I'm not sure exactly how to define it other than as a troll-like manifestation of Saga's fears about motherhood as much as the creature in Hatching was a manifestation of Tinja's repressed anger.

Rupert Grint, who next appears in Ebenezer, is quite good, even if it seems as if he aged into a middle-aged man overnight, since I've seen little of his work since the Ron Weasley days, but that's on me, though he has signed on to play the adult Ron in Broadway's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. 

Seidi Haarla, however, who first impressed me in Juho Kuosmanen's terrific 2021 two-hander Compartment No. 6, goes for broke in a physically and emotionally demanding role. I couldn't say whether she drew from experience as the mother of three. Or whether Grint, the father of two, did the same.

If anything, Hannah Bergholm's film reminded me of Lynne Ramsay's Die My Darling in that Haarla, like Jennifer Lawrence's unhinged mother, ends up exposed in every way, snarling and crawling on the floor and doing everything possible to connect with her child. I was also reminded of Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in that Kuura never stops crying and whining, and Bergholm waits until the very end to show his face in full. 

While Hatching struck me as the more original proposition, Nightborn is well worth a look for anyone interested in Finnish cinema, folk horror, or spooky films about strange kids--and their freaked-out mothers--though pregnant people should think twice before subjecting themselves to Saga's...saga.  

   

Nightborn, which is now on Shudder in the States, premieres at LIFF on Oct 9 at Vue West End and plays again on Oct 10 at Prince Charles Cinema and Oct 14 at BFI Southbank, though tickets only remain available for Oct 9. Images from ICF via Moviejawn (Seidi Haarla), CSFD.SK (Haarla and Rupert Grint), Eye for Film (Haarla and Grint), and FirstShowing.Net (Haarla).

LFF Dispatch #2: NYC Duo Kevin Walker and Jack Auen Conjure Up the Past as a Living Thing in Their Directorial Debut Chronovisor

CHRONOVISOR
(Kevin Walker and Jack Auen, USA, 2026, 99 minutes)

Sailin' away on the crest of a wave / It's like magic / Oh, rollin' and ridin' and slippin' and slidin' / It's magic.--ELO, "Livin’ Thing" (1976) 

Béatrice Courte (Anne Laure Sellier, a French professor of behavioral science), a Columbia University researcher and philosophy professor, sets out to solve the mystery of the Chronovisor, a machine that can reportedly record the past, in this text-intensive metaphysical mystery from Cosmic Salon, aka Maryland/NYC filmmaking duo Kevin Walker and Jack Auen.

At the New York Society Library (actually a library at Johns Hopkins), her home away from home, Béatrice pores over books and periodicals and listens to audio recordings and at her apartment, she watches videos. She's often the only one in the library late at night, illuminated by the green glow of a banker's lamp (Leo Zhang shot the film in warm, soft-edged 16mm and excerpts from Holst's The Planets provide the stratospheric score). 

Left: Kevin Walker and 

Jack Auen

In the course of her research, she finds that Father Pellegrino Ernetti, a Benedictine monk born in 1925, claims that he created the device with the aid of 12 physicists. If this was a documentary, we would assume he was a charlatan. It isn't, though the vast majority of the names, claims, and facts presented are real. 

But that doesn't mean Ernetti was on the up and up. Béatrice finds, for instance, an explanation for his most startling photograph: a closeup on a crucified Christ wearing an expression that recalls Maria Falconetti in Dryer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. According to Ernetti, the released photo was a facsimile, but that doesn't explain what happened to the original.

Further, Ernetti never explained how The Chronovisor works before he went missing, so the mystery isn't just about its inner workings, but about what happened to the device and to its inventor. Since then, conspiracy theories have proliferated, accompanied by Elvis-like sightings. Considering that the monk would be 101 in 2026, it seems unlikely that he he's still alive. 

Béatrice reaches out to Ernetti's relatives and associates in hopes that they can provide some insight. In the process, she unlocks a treasure trove of additional materials. 

Sellier, who resembles German actress Nina Hoss, isn't really an actress, and she doesn't really act. Instead, she listens, watches, and reads. As she does, Walker and Auen illuminate relevant text passages, sometimes translating them from the original French or Italian, languages Béatrice speaks. They also gave the subtitles a slightly aged look, a nice touch exemplifying their holistic approach. 

In its early stages, the directors depict Béatrice having drinks with colleagues and speaking at a lectern before an academic audience, but she seems most comfortable, possibly even happiest, alone in the dark swimming in words. For better or for worse, I found that relatable. 

Then she travels to Italy and transitions from observer to participant.

Though Chronovisor is an experimental film, it's easy to figure out what's going on at any given time. In Italy, however, Walker and Auen create painterly images that prove hard to decipher. Rough, colored outlines appear on a black background. Sometimes they're splotchy and mottled. At other times, they look like red and blue 3D images. This section, which concludes the film, does and does not solve the mystery. In that sense, I was reminded of Ivan Zulueta's sole feature Arrebato, Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep, and Laura Citarella's Trenque Lauquen. In all three films, the protagonists lose themselves in the mysteries they're trying to solve.

For the most part, though, Walker and Auen's directorial debut, which follows several shorts, is its own beast. 

The biggest question, for me, wasn't whether the device did what Ernetti said it did, but whether it was a good idea in the first place. After all, he came to believe it was dangerous, leading the Vatican to get involved, which is never a good thing, but could have been worse if governments got ahold of it.

It also occurred to me that since cameras didn't exist thousands of years ago, it was up to artists to tell us about their times, and maybe that's how it's meant to be, not least when artists have fewer practical reasons to do so now when they can just pick up a camera phone or, worse yet, turn to Claude or ChatGPT, and when it's harder than ever to make a living from art.

Chronovisor, however, is art. No doubt about it.

Stream Walker and Auen's 2021 short film, "Marblehead," here.

Chronovisor plays Seattle's Northwest Film Forum, through Tues, Oct 6. It premieres in London at LFF on Oct 9 at BFI Southbank and plays again on Oct 11 at ICA. Both screenings are sold out, though some tickets should be available at the door. Images from Grasshopper via InReview Online (film still), Filmmaker - Substack (Walker and Auen), Woodstock Film Festival (the face of Jesus, supposedly), and Reactor Mag (Anne Laure Sellier).

LIFF Dispatch #1: The 2026 BFI London Film Festival - 70 Years Old and Still Kicking

It's been years since I've attended the BFI London Film Festival, so this isn't my first, but it's hard to resist an anniversary, and this year, LFF turns 70. 

By contrast, the Seattle International Film Festival, my hometown festival, turned 50 in 2024, the Toronto International Film Festival turned 50 in 2025, the New York Film Festival--which coincides with LFF--turned 60 in 2022, and the Cucalorus Film Festival, for which I've been serving on the narrative judging committee, turned 30 in 2024. 

Compared to Cannes and Venice, LFF is relatively young, but of the festivals with which I'm most familiar, it's the oldest. If you haven't heard much about it, though, that's because it may have many high-profile films, but it doesn't have the highest-profile premieres. Instead, though it's a competitive festival--unlike NYFF--it's more about programming that culls from the best of the competitive festivals in a world-class city with ample opportunities to see actors and directors in person, whether at screenings, events, or as part of the Screen Talk series. 

This year's jury presidents include Sam Pollard (MLK/FBI), Amir El-Masry (Giant), Sandhya Suri (Santosh), and Helen Simmons (100 Nights of Hero). The Official Competition includes judges Julie La Bassiere (DDA Global) and Mariano Llinás (the 808-minute La Flor), who will be at LFF with the 324-minute documentary Life of Jorge Luis Borges. Julia Loktev's 370-minute My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile will also be at LFF, though I doubt I'll have time for either. Jury award winners will be announced on Oct 18.

I don't arrive in London until Oct 8, so I won't be able to make it to the Oct 7 Talks with Sofia Coppola or Andrew Scott either, though I'm hoping to make it to Eleanor Coppola's documentary Making Marie Antoinette, which was completed by Sofia Coppola, and Simon Stone's Elsinore, the opening night film, in which Scott plays actor Ian Charleson, who gave his final performance in Richard Eyre's Hamlet before succumbing to complications from AIDS eight weeks later (I've been watching Netflix's Ripley to prepare).

Though LFF excludes the word "International," this year's festival includes 251 films from 88 countries, including 33 world premieres. Of those premieres, the most notable, from a PNW perspective, is Travis Knight's adaptation of writer/ musician Colin Meloy and illustrator Carson Ellis's 2011 fantasy novel, Wildwood, produced by Oregon animation studio Laika (Kelly Reichardt adapted stories from Colin's sister, Maile Meloy, into Certain Women). 

This year's lineup also includes 109 female filmmakers or 43%, which is estimable, though 49% of SIFF 2026's filmmakers identified as female or nonbinary. I don't know if LFF counts female and nonbinary filmmakers in the same way, but I'm always happy to root for the home team when I can.

 

Though most of LFF's lineup includes films that haven't opened in the  States, even if they've played other festivals, there are exceptions. If anything, I was surprised to find that Boots Riley's I Love Boosters hadn't opened in the UK. It opened SIFF in May, and I recommend it, unless you're allergic to bright colors, absurdist humor, or collective action. Riley came to Seattle with the film, but not with any of the cast members. Naomi Ackie, on the other hand, will be at LFF, though I don't know if she'll be at all three screenings. She's also doing a Screen Talk I hope to attend on Oct 10. 

More: Lance Oppenheim's Primetime opened in the States on Sept 25; I wrote about it for The Stranger. (His Elizabeth Holmes documentary with Nathan Fielder, You Can See Everything, is also making the festival rounds, though it isn't playing LFF.) Hanna Bergholm's folk horror Nighborn, another new-to-the-UK title, opened in July and is now streaming on Shudder. I'll have more to say about Bergholm's second feature in a subsequent post. 

There a few other films that fit this category, but there's something about seeing a film, any film, in a country other than your own that enhances or alters the experience, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out.

LFF 2026 runs from Oct 7-18 at venues across London. Please see the festival site for more information. Poster images: the BFI and Kinoafisha 

It's Punks Versus Skinheads in Jeremy Saulnier's Fast and Bloody Green Room

A decade ago, A24 released Green Room. Somewhere along the way, my review for The Stranger got truncated, so here's the full version. Slightly revised from the original text.

GREEN ROOM

(Jeremy Saulnier, USA, 2015, 95 minutes) 

There's a moment in many horror movies when the director breaks from the main story to show how the monster got so monstrous. Then they return to the action, but the stakes are raised, because the bad guy isn't as faceless as before. Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin) has no time for that jive. Bad guys are bad guys. The goal is to escape their clutches by any means possible. 

And so it goes for the punk band, the Ain't Rights, that ends up playing a gig at a white supremacist compound in Oregon--shades of Malheur--out of sheer desperation. The group, which includes Anton Yelchin (Star Trek's Chekov) and Alia Shawkat (Kelly Reichardt's Oregon-set Night Moves), raises a convincing racket, but they don't help their cause when they open their set with Dead Kennedys' evergreen 1981 anthem "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." 

Then they witness a murder and the neo-Nazis (led by a chilly Patrick Stewart, the cast's other Star Trek veteran) give them the "Hotel California" treatment, i.e. "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." From that point forward, it's punks versus skinheads set to a propulsive soundtrack of Bad Brains, Slayer, and Poison Idea.

In contrast with Tony Kaye's American History X and Shane Meadows' This Is England, Saulnier's skins play more like cold-hearted businessmen than pathetic fucks. The fun is in witnessing the ingenious ways the punks--including two turncoats--fight back using the crudest tools available. 

It's fast, bloody, and when you least expect it: hilarious.

Postscript: A24 released Green Room on April 15, 2016. A little over a month later, Anton Yelchin was dead at 27 due to a vehicle malfunction (his family settled with the manufacturer out of court). A documentary about his life, Love Antosha, appeared in 2019, but I'm still not ready to watch it.

Left: Jeremy Saulnier with Aaron Pierre

On a  happier note, Saulnier followed Green Room with the Netflix movies Hold the Dark and Rebel Ridge, which won the 2024 Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie. It was one of the year's best and introduced the world to Aaron Pierre, who first came to my attention in Barry Jenkins' adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. Pierre can now be seen on HBO's Lanterns opposite Kyle Chandler.

Also, I had no idea who Callum Turner was in 2016, and didn't mention him in my review (I didn't mention Imogen Poots or Macon Blair either). This year, Turner appeared in several features, including the inimitable Mark Jenkin's Rose of Nevada. He's also reportedly in the running as the next James Bond. And, oh yeah, he married pop superstar Dua Lipa in May.

Green Room plays Northwest Film Forum for one night only on Wed, Oct 14, as part of Seattle Film Critics Society's SFCS at 10 series. After the screening, Matt Oakes (Silver Screen Riot) will be conducting a live virtual interview with Jeremy Saulnier. We're working on other surprises, as well. 

Click here for tickets and more information. We'll be following with David Eggers' The VVitch on Nov 19 and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight on Dec 9.  

Images from A24 by way of Vox (Callum Turner, Alia Shawkat, and Anton Yelchin) and The Guardian (Patrick Stewart with Brent Werzner, Mason Knight, Samuel Summer, and Colton Ruscheinsky) and The Associated Press (Jeremy Saulnier with Aaron Pierre / credit: AP Photo / Chris Pizzello).  

Begotten: E. Elias Merhige’s Debut Rises from the Dead to Freak You Out All Over Again

BEGOTTEN 

(E. Elias Merhige, USA, 1989, 72 minutes) 

In its abstraction, E. Elias Merhige's directorial debut, Begotten, plays like a Gothic goulash of silent film fragments that have been moldering and degrading for decades. 

 

The combination of rephotographed 16mm B&W reversal film, neutral-density filtration, musique concrète, and eerie sound effects conjures up a powerful sense of unease, enhanced by the lack of dialogue or intertitles. 

The story involves three characters: God, Mother Earth, and the Son of Earth, all played by members of Merhige's stage company Theatreofmaterial. Through an open door, he begins with a masked, white-garbed God (Brian Salzburg) on a chair in a corner, spattered with deep black blood as he slices away at his midsection with a straight razor. As he slashes, God convulses while what sounds like a clock submerged in water ticks away on the soundtrack (other sounds arranged and composed by Evan Albam include thunder, buzzing flies and crickets, heartbeats, and persistent moans). 

Gradually, entrails fall to the floor. Even after God takes a final breath and slumps to the side, the blood continues to flow until Mother Earth (Donna Dempsey), wearing a diaphanous dress with a mask covering her eyes, emerges from underneath the voluminous fabric and glides out of the room. 

 

After spinning around, head tilted toward the sky, she returns to God where she proceeds to impregnate herself. It isn't necrophilia in the usual sense, but she takes what she needs to conceive. Most every image in the film is too nebulous to cause offense. 

Merhige then shifts to a rocky hillside on which her naked, fully-grown, mud-encrusted son (Stephen Charles Barry), aka Flesh on Bone, writhes while nomads in threadbare robes watch impassively before carting him away on a makeshift stretcher to inflict more pain before dragging him to the top of the hill. Merhige probably wouldn't appreciate a comparison to The Passion of the Christ, but it definitely crossed my mind, since Mel Gibson's blood-drenched drama practically exults in Jesus's protracted, excruciating ordeal. 

After the son is left to die, the mother returns to drag him away by an umbilical cord-like lead, but she doesn't get far before pants-free nomads arrive to torture her. As they drag away her lifeless body, the son can only watch helplessly. Then again, if she had dragged him much further, she might have strangled him. There's beauty in this film, but there's no love or tenderness. It simply doesn't exist in the pitiless world Merhige has created. 

By the end, the bodies have been returned to the Earth. Considering that I watched this film back-to-back with The Life We Leave, it occurred to me that Merhige was ahead of the curve when it comes to terramation. He even ends with buds emerging from the soil as the nomads go about their business without a thought for the mulched-up victims of their violence. 

 

Begotten is a singular experience, though it reminds me of things I would rather not think about, like Marilyn Manson. Merhige, a one-time collaborator, helped to shape Manson's image through videos and tour production. Then again, Trent Reznor was drawing from similar influences, like death-obsessed photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, and look at the two guys now: Reznor has gone from strength to strength, particularly in his film-scoring partnership with Atticus Ross, while Manson is now better known for the horrific abuse he inflicted on several women, including actress Evan Rachel Wood. 

Merhige, I'm sure, couldn't have known what was to come, and the two last worked together 30 years ago, but I did my due diligence and watched the videos for "Antichrist Superstar" and "Cryptorchid." In the first, Manson plays a dirtbag fascist ranting from a stage in front of an adoring crowd. There's no trace of Merhige's personality, but the latter is a different story, since it plays like Begotten in miniature, not least because it includes footage from the feature. Even the crackling sound design is similar. 

The director followed up with two studio pictures, 2000's Oscar-nominated horror satire Shadow of the Vampire and 2004's psychological thriller Suspect Zero, before making two short Begotten sequels, 2006's "Din of Celestial Birds" and 2022's "Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera," and a final video for Interpol's "The Heinrich Maneuver." Since then, he's worked mostly in theater, though he supervised the 4K restoration of his first feature and has been working on a Leonardo DiCaprio-produced survival drama.

 

Though I hadn't yet seen Begotten in 2000, Merhige's reputation preceded him, and I made certain to catch his followup when I attended the Toronto International Film Festival that year, especially because he was in attendance with Willem Dafoe, who plays actor Max Schreck, John Malkovich, who plays Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau, and Catherine McCormack, who plays actress Greta Schröder. I found the film, which has all the humor Begotten lacks, pretty delightful. 

Merhige's first and last film for Lionsgate presents a highly fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at the making of Murnau's 1922 masterpiece with Malkovich as a win-at-all-costs director and Dafoe in go-for-broke mode as a real-life, bloodsucking Count Orlock. No doubt Merhige had great fun recreating B&W sequences from the original film. If Begotten wasn't to my taste, Vampire definitely was, and I wish he had made more films like it. 

To his credit, though, Begotten has garnered plenty of admirers. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, who found the film "grotesquely pretentious," was not one of them, but the great cultural critic Susan Sontag was fully on board. At the very least, it's part of an experimental, late-20th-century lineage that includes such notable works as Bill Morrison's Decasia, Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God, and Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle.  

Love or loathe it, Begotten is the kind of film every cinephile should see at least once. And for the Goth or Goth-adjacent: it should be required viewing.

9/30/26 update: J. Hoberman has had somewhat of a change of heart.

 

Begotten opens at New York's Film Forum on Oct 2; sneak preview on Oct 1 with the director in attendance. It opens in Seattle at Northwest Film Forum on Oct 23. Begotten images (featuring Donna Dempsey and Stephen Charles Barry) from Kino Lorber and Shadow of the Vampire image (Willem Dafoe and Catherine McCormack) from Lionsgate by way of Anti-Film School.